This typewriter turns your words into music

On its own, the sound of a manual typewriter is almost musical.
The percussion of the keys being depressed, the ding and the
scratch of the carriage as it's pushed back to its starting point
all work together to create an analog orchestra. Just imagine then,
if the words you write on the typewriter could create music, too.
What would a word, sentence or paragraph sound like translated
through an outdated machine?

This strange question actually has an answer, thanks to Lasse Munk and
Søren Andreasen, two musically inclined designers from Denmark.
By connecting some old-school machinery to new-fangled technology,
the duo has figured out a way to translate your words into
music.

The machine that makes it happen, D.O.R.T.H.E (short for Danish
Orchestra of Radios Talking and Hacked Engines), is a system made
up of old, discarded electronics that Munk and Andreasen found in a
junkyard.

"The employees in Danish scrapyards are pretty strict about not
letting people dumpster dive there, but Søren makes a pretty decent
cup of chai and a good chocolate cake, so with the precautions of
'just looking like we were throwing stuff out,' we were allowed to
fill a car with a lot of thrown out (but pretty well-working)
electronics," says Munk.

They made out with $300 (£181) worth of goods -- a scanner,
printer, radio, cassette player and the aforementioned typewriter
-- and repurposed them into a totally new machine. Think of
D.O.R.T.H.E. as an electronic music box, where each word acts as a
pin to create a sound or tone. Every letter on the typewriter is
essentially a trigger. These letters are connected to an Arduino
mega, which analyses the data before piping it through to software
where it's processed and translated to a mechanical staccato
musical sequence.

D.O.R.T.H.E. does basic translations like turning the number of
letters in a word to a certain music pitch, but it also can tackle
simple emotional states like joy, discomfort, fear and happiness.
"For starters we matched simple words and sentences like the
'dorthe gives us a fresh beat' on the video and made a semantic map
so that: 'fresh + beat' must mean uptempo combined with some kinky
nice danceable melody work," Munk explains.

To Munk and Andreasen, exploring sound is just as important as
focusing on the visual design of an object. After all, they
explain, so often we take in and decode sounds from unseen objects
without even thinking about it. D.O.R.T.H.E. is a way to
visualize these sounds.

Of course, its powers of semantic music making aren't perfect,
and the designers admit it's very much a work in progress. "The
tonal material for melodies can be quite random at the moment,"
Munk says.